“In that case I guess I’ve never really been afraid of losing my mind,” she said lightly.
Anna got up and walked over to the window. After a while she returned to the sofa. We’re much more like our parents than we think, Linda thought. I’ve seen Henrietta move in just the same way when she’s anxious: get up, walk around, and then sit down again.
“I thought I saw my father yesterday,” Anna said. “On a street in Malmö.”
Linda raised her eyebrows.
“Your father? You saw him on the street?”
“Yes.”
Linda thought about it.
“But you’ve never even seen him — not really, I mean. You were so young when he left.”
“I have pictures of him.”
Linda did the math in her head.
“It’s been twenty-five years since he left.”
“Twenty-four.”
“Twenty-four, then. How much do you think a person changes in twenty-four years? You can’t know. All you know is that he must have changed.”
“It was him. My mother told me about his gaze. I’m sure it was him. It must have been him.”
“I didn’t even know you were in Malmö yesterday. I thought you were going in to Lund, to study or whatever it is you do there.”
Anna looked at her appraisingly.
“You don’t believe me.”
“You don’t believe it yourself.”
“It was my dad.”
She took a deep breath.
“You’re right; I had been in Lund. When I got as far as Malmö and had to change trains. There was a problem with the line. The train was cancelled. Suddenly I had two hours to kill until the next one. It put me in a terrible mood since I hate waiting. I walked into town, without any clear idea of what I was going to do, just to get rid of some of the unwanted, irritating time. Somewhere along the line I walked into a store and bought a pair of socks I didn’t even need. As I was walking past the Saint Jörgen Hotel a woman had fallen down in the street. I didn’t walk up close — I can’t stand the sight of blood. Her skirt was bunched up, and I remember wondering why no one pulled it down for her. I was sure she was dead. A bunch of people had gathered to look, as if she were a dead creature washed up on the beach. I walked away, through the Triangle, and walked into the big hotel there in order to take their glass elevator up to the roof. That’s something I always do when I’m in Malmö. It’s like taking a glass balloon up into the sky. But this time I wasn’t allowed to do it — now you have to operate the elevator with your room key. That was a blow. It felt as if someone had taken a toy away. I sat down in one of the plush armchairs in the lobby and looked out the window and was planning to stay there until it was time to walk back to the station.
“That’s when I saw him. He was standing on the street. Now and then a gust of wind made the windowpane rattle. I looked up, and there he was on the sidewalk looking at me. Our eyes met and we stared at each other for about five seconds. Then he looked down and walked away. I was so shocked it didn’t even occur to me to follow him. To be perfectly honest I still didn’t believe I had really seen him. I thought it was a hallucination or a trick of the light. Sometimes you see someone and you think it’s a person from your past, but it’s really just a stranger. When I finally did run out and look around, he was gone. I felt a bit like an animal stalking its prey when I walked back to the train station — I tried to sniff out where he could be. I was so excited — upset, actually — that I hunted through the inner city and missed my train. He was nowhere to be found. But I was sure that it was him. He looked just like he did in the picture I have. And my mother once said he had a habit of first looking up before he said anything. I saw him make that exact gesture when he was standing on the sidewalk on the other side of the window. When he left all those years ago he had long hair and thick black-rimmed glasses; he doesn’t look like that now. His hair is much shorter and his glasses are the kind without frames around the lenses.
“I called you because I needed to talk to someone about it. I thought I would go nuts otherwise. It was him, it was my father. And it wasn’t just that I recognized him; he stopped on the sidewalk outside because he had recognized me.”
Anna spoke with total conviction. Linda tried to remember what she had learned about eyewitness accounts — about the rate of accuracy in their reconstructions of events and the potential for embellishment. She also thought about what they had been taught about giving descriptions at the academy, and the computer exercises they had done. One assignment consisted of aging their own faces by twenty years. Linda had seen how she started looking more and more like her father, even a little like her grandfather. Our ancestors survive somewhere in our faces, she thought. If you look like your mother as a child, you end up as your father when you age. When you no longer recognize your face it’s because an unknown ancestor has taken up residence for a while.
Linda found it hard to accept the idea that Anna had actually seen her father. He would hardly have recognized the grown woman his little girl had become, unless he had been secretly following her development all these years. Linda quickly thought through what she knew about the mysterious Erik Westin. Anna’s parents had been very young when she was born. They had both grown up in big cities but been beguiled by the seventies’ environmental movement — the so-called green wave — and had ended up in a collective out in the isolated countryside of Småland. Linda had a vague memory that Erik Westin was handy, that he specialized in making orthopedic sandals. But she had also heard Henrietta describe him as impossible, a hashish-smoking loser whose sole objective in life was to do as little as possible and who had no idea what it meant to take responsibility for a child. But what had made him leave? He had left no letter, nor any signs of extensive preparations. The police had looked for him at first, but there had never been any indication of crime and they eventually shelved the case.
Nonetheless, Westin’s disappearance must have been carefully choreographed. He had taken his passport and what little money he had — most of it left over from selling their car, which had actually belonged to Henrietta. She was the only one with an income at the time, working as a night guard at a local hospital.
Erik Westin was there one day and gone the next. He had left on unannounced trips before, so Henrietta waited two weeks before contacting the police.
Linda also recalled that her own father had been involved in the subsequent investigation. There had been little to go on, since Westin had no record — no previous arrests or convictions, nor any history of mental illness, for that matter. A few months before he disappeared he had undergone a complete physical and been given a clean bill of health, aside from a little anemia.
Linda knew from police statistics that most missing persons eventually turn up again. Of those who didn’t, the majority were suicides. Only a few were the victims of crime, buried in unknown places or decomposing at the bottom of a lake with weights attached to them.
“Have you told your mom?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I’m still in shock.”
“I’d say you’re still not fully convinced it was him.”
Anna looked at her with pleading eyes.
“I know it was. If it wasn’t, my brain has suffered a major short-circuit. That’s why I asked you if you’ve ever been afraid you were going crazy.”
“But why would he come back now, after twenty-four years? Why would he turn up in Malmö and look at you through a hotel window — how did he know you were there?”